About Tony Sarris – N2Semantics

I am the founder and principal of N2Semantics. I provide consulting services to companies developing and applying semantic technologies, including artificial intelligence and cognitive computing.
At N2Semantics we believe the future of apps is to make them smarter -- more aware of the world in which they operate to serve the needs and interests of their users.
Our mission is to foster the development of semantic technologies and to help companies determine the best approaches and technologies for adding semantic knowledge or meaning to their applications.

Bill Gates recently spoke at a Microsoft Research event about the return of Microsoft Bob and by association everybody’s favorite on-screen personal assistant, Clippy. Well, he didn’t literally say that MS Bob and Clippy would be back directly incarnate, but he said he could envision them returning in some form as part of a new wave of personal agents or assistants, but with “a bit more sophistication”. A bit more? That’s sort of like saying Michelangelo’s David is like the prehistoric cave art at Lascaux Caves in France, but with “a bit more sophistication”. I mean no disrespect by the way to those cave dwelling artists, who deserve a lot of credit for being among perhaps the first humans to create art, or at least art that was preserved.

A few weeks ago, I blogged here about personal assistants. My vision for them is nothing like Microsoft Bob and his sidekick, Clippy. And in an important sense, Bill Gates and Microsoft are not even at all like the early cave artists; Bill Gates and Microsoft did not pioneer personal digital assistants.

To me, the pioneers for software-based personal assistants were the people who developed expert systems starting back in the 1970s and continuing up to about the time that Microsoft Bob debuted in 1995. I’m talking for example about things like Mycin and Eurisko. Of course the logic rules for those systems were hand-coded, something that won’t scale if personal assistants are to become commonplace in our future. Expert systems also only worked well when applied in specialized domains where specific background knowledge about the domain could be encoded without needing to pull in voluminous knowledge about the everyday world around us. Maybe Microsoft Bob’s tragic failure doomed expert systems and AI? No, at least not on their own. I think what doomed expert systems and AI was the hype gap between envisioned and expected capabilities, the latter being capabilities that far exceeded the ability of technology at that time to deliver.

For the record, I also don’t consider Apple Siri and Google Now as true personal, virtual assistants or software agents. They are flashy and fun in large part because of their natural language user interaction abilities. I do, however, like that they convey a sense that they know a little about us and our everyday world (I just wish they ‘understood’ more), and that they are trying to help us accomplish tasks in that environment. Because of that, they certainly represent steps in the right direction. I’d like to see other steps — and, yes, that includes whatever Microsoft is working on, building on the foundation it laid down with Bob and Clippy [note, later revealed to be Cortana].

Who is doing work in this important area? Tempo AI, for example, is doing some neat things within the calendaring domain. Do you know of some others, and if so, can you share without exposing intellectual property? I’d like to hear about what’s coming, and if I can help get it here faster, just have your personal assistant contact me on your behalf!